New subject: GNAA Deleted!

28 Nov 2006

The Cunctator wrote:

...
  On 11/28/06, Tony Jacobs &lt;gtjacobs(a)hotmail.com&gt;
wrote:

  Of those that were independent, they fell into
three classes: some made
 only
 a passing mention of GNAA, some were articles where GNAA was only
 mentioned
 in the message board responses at the bottom, and those that were 
 actually
 *about* GNAA were blogs (there were one or two of those).  We use plenty
 of
 internet sources (not the least of which is IMDb, and I've seen 
 plenty of
 citations to online mags like Salon and Slate), but blogs have been 
 deemed
 below the threshhold. 
 Which is ridiculous, because blogs are a medium, not a particular source.
 Banning all blogs as sources is absurd. A much better policy, one which
 respects the reader rather than treating him like a child, is to 
 source the
 articles properly. If the source is a blog, the reader can supply his
 judgment in how much credence to give the source. Similarly with say, the
 New York Times, CNN, or the Washington Times, or Pravda. 
The reader can only supply judgment about the credibility of a source if 
there is some information upon which to exercise that judgment. The 
reason blogs get singled out as a category is not because they cannot 
ever be useful sources, but because so few of them provide the 
information a reader would need to decide how it stacks up against other 
sources. (I assume that the reader won't make the decision based on the 
fact that it's a blog, since as you rightly point out, that's only a 
label for the medium in general.)

For example, the existence of independent sources is essential, both to 
maintain a neutral presentation and to avoid gullibly repeating 
falsehoods. But when you have a blog of unknown provenance, it's 
impossible to know whether it qualifies as independent (Wal-Mart Across 
America, anyone?). At some point, editorial judgment requires that 
certain material should be rejected when offered as a source, and if 
that's all the material available on a particular subject, then we have 
to decline to write about it.

--Michael Snow

Re: [WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!